“THE ON-DEMAND BRAND is witty, insightful, dynamic and highly inspiring. This book should be required reading for marketers - or anyone trying to understand how to keep their brand relevant and energized through the rapidly changing consumer landscape. Mathieson has a gifted ability to dig under the breakthrough ideas that are keeping top brands engaged with their current and new consumers, offering key insider takeaways that we can all learn from”

“THE ON-DEMAND BRAND is witty, insightful, dynamic and highly inspiring. This book should be required reading for marketers - or anyone trying to understand how to keep their brand relevant and energized through the rapidly changing consumer landscape. Mathieson has a gifted ability to dig under the breakthrough ideas that are keeping top brands engaged with their current and new consumers, offering key insider takeaways that we can all learn from”

“THE ON-DEMAND BRAND is witty, insightful, dynamic and highly inspiring. This book should be required reading for marketers - or anyone trying to understand how to keep their brand relevant and energized through the rapidly changing consumer landscape. Mathieson has a gifted ability to dig under the breakthrough ideas that are keeping top brands engaged with their current and new consumers, offering key insider takeaways that we can all learn from”

“THE ON-DEMAND BRAND is witty, insightful, dynamic and highly inspiring. This book should be required reading for marketers - or anyone trying to understand how to keep their brand relevant and energized through the rapidly changing consumer landscape. Mathieson has a gifted ability to dig under the breakthrough ideas that are keeping top brands engaged with their current and new consumers, offering key insider takeaways that we can all learn from”

“THE ON-DEMAND BRAND is witty, insightful, dynamic and highly inspiring. This book should be required reading for marketers - or anyone trying to understand how to keep their brand relevant and energized through the rapidly changing consumer landscape. Mathieson has a gifted ability to dig under the breakthrough ideas that are keeping top brands engaged with their current and new consumers, offering key insider takeaways that we can all learn from”

“THE ON-DEMAND BRAND is witty, insightful, dynamic and highly inspiring. This book should be required reading for marketers - or anyone trying to understand how to keep their brand relevant and energized through the rapidly changing consumer landscape. Mathieson has a gifted ability to dig under the breakthrough ideas that are keeping top brands engaged with their current and new consumers, offering key insider takeaways that we can all learn from”

"I see a reversal in polarity...Right now, in a sense, all of us are passive recipients of 'information offers' of various sorts that come at us, and we have to find some mechanism for filtering it, and we make certain decisions based on our interests. WE sit in a small bubble being surrounded by this increasing torrent of efforts to attract our attention, to have our channel focus on them for the moment.

"I think that's going to reverse in much the same way it once was the media that were passive and the consumer was active. You had the newspaper, the broadcast television screen that we all sat around and watched together, and so on, turning the channels.

"We played a different role. Now they're coming at us and finding us without us having to find them. I think ultimately that breaks down, simply out of the inability to adequately make choices in the face of what will be an overwhelming clutter of information that becomes ever less useful.

"What will happen instead is that we will create a kind of electronic envelope around us that has an active set of receptors, not passive receptors on the surface...And you have intentions and desires either for information, or action, or communication, or transactions, and [this envelope] around you seeks out in that information environment the interconnections and information and localized information that you need at that time, and creates the connections and transactions and operates on your behalf.

"I call it a 'transaction envelope.' And rather than you being the passive recipient, the environment now awaits you reaching out to it, in one way or another, based on your intentions. But it is a whole set of electronic interactions mediated by this new interface between you and the world."

-- Futurist Peter Schwartz, Founder & CEO of The Global Business Network, by way of warning marketers: Those who don't want your marketing messages may soon have new ways of tuning you out. From THE ON-DEMAND BRAND (out this Wednesday from AMACOM BOOKS). Read more - and pre-order your own copy, here.

“THE ON-DEMAND BRAND is witty, insightful, dynamic and highly inspiring. This book should be required reading for marketers - or anyone trying to understand how to keep their brand relevant and energized through the rapidly changing consumer landscape. Mathieson has a gifted ability to dig under the breakthrough ideas that are keeping top brands engaged with their current and new consumers, offering key insider takeaways that we can all learn from”

Tom Clancy's on the phone - and answering the call might just be a real blast.

Game maker ubisoft recently launched a campaign on Twitter and Facebook that rewarded those who opted into a mobile fan club to get a special code to unlock a special weapon inside the Xbox 360 game "Splinter Cell: Conviction."

The campaign, from Waterfall Mobile, enabled consumers to send the keyword "WEAPON" to 44144 to get the code to unlock the item within the game. It was so successful ubisoft tripled subscriptions to its mobile club.

Mobile has played a role in the "Splinter Cell" series for some time. As I wrote about in my first book, BRANDING UNBOUND, success on one level of game play in "Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow," was contingent on the protagonist mastering a Sony Ericsson smart phone.

And in my new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND (out this Wednesday from AMACOM), I look at how many brands use mobile to activate offerings within other properties - from entertainment to consumer packaged goods.

“THE ON-DEMAND BRAND is witty, insightful, dynamic and highly inspiring. This book should be required reading for marketers - or anyone trying to understand how to keep their brand relevant and energized through the rapidly changing consumer landscape. Mathieson has a gifted ability to dig under the breakthrough ideas that are keeping top brands engaged with their current and new consumers, offering key insider takeaways that we can all learn from”

Like Xerox, Kodak can seem like an anachronism, a remnant of a bygone era when people took rolls of film down to the developer and waited to see pictures that would eventually be stuffed in shoe boxes or scrap booked as a keepsake.

Sure, Kodak paper has been available for home printers for years.

But I actually didn't realize they make digital cameras.

I also didn't realize the company would regain so much relevance in the digital era through an ambitious new campaign. Now, the company tells us, a Kodak moment isn't captured and stored away, but shared instantly, with everyone you want, via social media.

Think print and television advertising balanced with a microsite called kodakmoments.com (where you can submit images as part of a Kodak Moments contest) and built-in share buttons on cameras that tag images and videos for email, Facebook, Flickr, the Kodak Gallery (a kind of Kodak-branded Snaphfish) or YouTube.

According to today's New York Times, the target of all this is mom, of course, "the chief memory officer of the family" (spot shown here notwithstanding, though obviously it would appear to her.)

It is also the perfect example of the on-demand brand, one that turns products into services that instantly enable consumers to create and share through digital media.

As I point out in my new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND (out Wednesday from AMACOM), in the very near future, product success will have less to do with the manufactured quality, than with the digital services they enable. Kodak lives perfectly in that intersection, and now makes moments instantly shareable, whenever, wherever we want, on demand.

“THE ON-DEMAND BRAND is witty, insightful, dynamic and highly inspiring. This book should be required reading for marketers - or anyone trying to understand how to keep their brand relevant and energized through the rapidly changing consumer landscape. Mathieson has a gifted ability to dig under the breakthrough ideas that are keeping top brands engaged with their current and new consumers, offering key insider takeaways that we can all learn from”

Gilt Groupe has launched "Gilt City" to compete with local discounter Groupon, according to TechCrunch.

The new invitation-only site is designed to offer limited-quantity, limited-time "exclusive local deals and offers up to 70% off."

To be clear, there's a difference between the two. While Groupon is for the masses, Gilt City is slightly more bargain, by the way. Another offer is for a discounted price on buying an entire yogurt shop chain.

Oh well. While I've been invited to join Gilt Gear, I have yet to be invited to the main Gilt site. And since I don't live in NYC, the localized offering will have to wait, too.

“THE ON-DEMAND BRAND is witty, insightful, dynamic and highly inspiring. This book should be required reading for marketers - or anyone trying to understand how to keep their brand relevant and energized through the rapidly changing consumer landscape. Mathieson has a gifted ability to dig under the breakthrough ideas that are keeping top brands engaged with their current and new consumers, offering key insider takeaways that we can all learn from”